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THE PROBLEM, CALEB Taggert thought, with scheduling dates anytime during when the General Assembly was in session was that you couldn’t control when the men—and it was mostly men talking—would shut up. In theory, everything and everyone had a time limit. In reality, the battles of the General Assembly waged on and on and on. And had for years now.
The guy talking now had been talking for hours. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t hours, but Caleb had stopped taking detailed notes and was letting his recorder do most of the work. The representative had stopped saying anything new or interesting at least ten minutes ago. The bill under discussion was this man’s pet project and he was going to say what he wanted to say. For reasons Caleb didn’t know, but probably had to do with some backend deal he wanted to know about, committee leadership wasn’t cutting this guy off. Of course, half of what he said was bullshit. Caleb’s copy for the Sunday paper would include a lot of fact-checking and reminding the people of North Carolina about the rules regarding voter registration, IDs and the history of poll taxes.
The Civil Rights Era had a long tail, with battles like gerrymandering and voting rights seeming to stick to his beloved home state like dog shit to a shoe. The only bright spot—if one could call it that—was that debates like this one reminded Caleb why he’d become a reporter and who he was responsible to. The representative blathering on would be an entertaining guy to have a beer with, but there wasn’t much else good Caleb could say about him. But the constituents whom the man shook hands with when he was home deserved to know what he did with the faith they put in him.
Caleb’s article would also include some nice details regarding the recent polling about gerrymandering and one-voter-one-vote done in his home district. Stark comparisons like that made good copy.
Finally, the guy stopped talking about voters counting twice, voting in districts where they weren’t registered and—the money shot of scare tactics—undocumented immigrants voting. The session was about to be wrapped up and then all the people crowded into the committee room would spill out onto the lawn for a rally in favor of election-map reform. He’d need to stay for that, too, and talk with some of the protestors. The paper was sending a photographer over—there were bound to be some good signs and probably an arrest or two.
Politics in North Carolina hadn’t been boring...well, they’d never been boring, but they’d certainly gotten more interesting in the past ten years. Power grabs tend to do that, no matter which party has its grasping hands out.
Caleb had a date in thirty minutes and a twenty-minute drive looming before he could hope to park. Of course, the representative who had driveled on about voter fraud had no knowledge of Caleb’s personal life and wouldn’t care if he did. The paper didn’t care about his personal life, either. He had other reps to interview, copy to write and deadlines to meet. None of which was conducive to his evening plans.
Caleb gave in and pulled out his phone.
Diatribe about made-up voter fraud or not, he tried to adhere to the current research about phones, distraction and meetings, and he usually kept his phone hidden when he should be paying attention to someone else. Especially on a day like today, when the rumor was that a bill limiting the people’s right to protest was going to be snuck onto the end of this bill—not quite in the dead of night, but they would certainly try to do it when no reporters were watching.
Besides, the research said loud and clear that “people can’t multitask.” It’s just that researchers never established whether boredom to the point of drool counted as multitasking.
Plus, he had his recorder going. If the guy slipped and mentioned that he had just bought a house outside of his district—well, Caleb would have that shit on tape. And the rumor about the rider with limits to protesting had come from an excellent source, one who would get Caleb the rider as soon as she saw it.
Power grabs also made for strange bedfellows.
Swiping down on his phone screen brought a list of notifications, most of which weren’t a surprise. Twenty work emails, three of which promised information in exchange for keeping the sender’s identity a secret. Ten personal emails. And a text from his dad.
Whoa-hoe... What was this? A notification from one of the dating apps he used. A wink—so a passive sign of interest from someone, rather than anything active.
Before he clicked to see who the wink was from, he texted his current date with information that he’d be late because of a work meeting and that he would bow to her wishes whether she wanted to wait, reschedule or call him an ass and kiss him goodbye.
After a quick glance up to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, Caleb flicked the notification open. Dogfan20895 was cute. Square jaw, but a big, toothy smile that more than made up for it. Dark brown eyes. A wicked way of lifting her eyebrows—wouldn’t that be fun to see her do in real life. Given that she had one photo of her with a brindle hound and one picture of the hound itself, she wasn’t kidding about being a dog fan.
But...she had a nice set of breasts and he couldn’t get over how arched those brows looked, so he winked back. Then he looked at her pictures again. Her smile was nice. The way she was laughing in that picture of her with her dog was even better. Caleb clicked the message button and typed out something quick.
Hey. Cute smile. Cute dog, too. What’s his name?
It wasn’t his best opening line, but he was working, supposed to be meeting another woman for a date and hadn’t read her profile yet. She’d either bite or she wouldn’t.
The world—especially the online-dating world—was full of women. If she didn’t at least nibble, well, there’d be another woman along with a smile that suggested she knew what he was up to.
“I DON’T LIKE the wall color,” the statuesque blonde with her hair up in a neat French roll said as she swept her arm around at the creamy, peachy beige that made up the walls of Buono Come Il Pane. “It’s too...bland. My wedding won’t be bland. It will be different,” the prospective bride said with the same finality she’d used for every proclamation she’d made about her wedding.
Different. Special. Unique. Memorable. All a lot of requests for something special out of a woman named Jennifer. Not that there was anything wrong with the name, but...
But the name was on every tenth woman, or so it seemed. Being one of a hundred Jennifers in any given square mile probably contributed to her desire for a unique wedding. Beck could be more forgiving.
Maybe.
Buono Come Il Pane hosted events of all kinds. Graduations. Retirement parties. Anniversaries. Birthdays. And weddings. Beck loved weddings the most—she really did. Her divorce hadn’t changed the fact that she loved happily-ever-afters and romances and engagement stories. But there were particular brides she didn’t love, and this woman seemed likely to walk down the aisle as one of them.
“Buono Come Il Pane’s decoration evokes the warmth of Tuscany,” Beck said. Buono Come Il Pane translated to “good as bread” and it meant something like “good as gold.” They served a small menu of finely crafted Tuscan food. They didn’t boast of the size of their wine list, letting the quality of their selections speak for themselves instead. The interior design was much the same—not spare so much as elegant.
“Its simplicity
